Washington, Nov. 3 (TNS): US President Trump’s personal Twitter account was briefly deactivated by a departing company employee, Twitter said, raising serious questions about the security of a social-media tool the president wields to set major policy agendas, connect with his voter base and lash out at his adversaries.
The deactivation sparks deep and troubling questions about who has access to the president’s personal account, @realDonaldTrump, and the power that access holds.
The deactivation also came at a time when the social network is under scrutiny for the role it played in spreading Russian propaganda during the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s account disappeared at around 7 p.m. ET Thursday, when visitors to the page were met with the message, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” For about an hour, even after the account returned, the Twittersphere joked about the short-lived window of history without @realDonaldTrump.
Then, at 8:05 p.m., at the same time Trump was tweeting about tax reform, the company posted a statement saying the president’s “account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee.”
“The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored,” Twitter’s statement read. “We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”
But two hours later, the company admitted that the deactivation wasn’t an accident at all: A preliminary investigation revealed that the account was taken offline “by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”
